The discord you're experiencing in your career is real, and to some extent it comes with the profession. Companies are in the business of making working softwa

The discord you're experiencing in your career is real, and to some extent it comes with the profession. Companies are in the business of making working software on time. But you can't always make software work on time. This puts stress on you. You're trying to get managers to stop setting bug deadlines on the theory that they don't understand that it doesn't help the situation. My assumption would be that they don't care that it doesn't help, they want me to do my job. I've worked for management that not only showed no signs of understanding the nature of making software, but also didn't understand the nature of making money. A much more serious problem in my opinion. Their job is to bring in the business and your job is to make the software work on time. It wasn't clear to me earlier that you may be dealing with executives by proxy of a project manager. That's a worse situation because you can't level with a project manager, they are stuck in the middle. You may want to go over his head (if you report to the p.m.) but if you do that, do not complain about him or anything else, bring only solutions and charm. See my other comment for some more constructive and specific suggestions.